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Friday, 19 June 2015

Guest Blog by Tom Williams: Waterloo + 200

Thursday June 18th
2015 was the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo and to mark
it I asked my friend and fellow-novelist Tom Williams to write a guest blog
about it. In it he puts the Waterloo Campaign into a perspective not often
emphasised – that it was not a seamless continuation of the Peninsular War but
the climax ofa surprise-crisis that caught
Britain unawares and demanded rapid ad-hoc measures to cope with it. These Tom
explains well and he also draws some very disturbing lessons for us today as we
see Britain – and Europe – sliding towards virtual demilitarisation, despite
external threats.

Tom Williams

Tom Williams’s
military fiction had a rather remarkable origin – enthusiasm for Tango dancing has
taken him on several trips to Buenos Aires, which has left him with a love of
Argentina. His book about the British invasion of 1806 and the role of the
real-life spy, James Burke, was based on his own experiences exploring Buenos
Aires, riding with gauchos on the pampas and trying (and failing) to cross the
snow-covered Andes on a horse. “Burke in
the Land of Silver” was followed by books about Burke's fictional
adventures in Egypt (“Burke and the
Bedouin”) and in Belgium (“Burke at
Waterloo”). Tom also writes rather more serious stories about Victorian
colonialism – a visit to Borneo spawned a book about James Brooke (“The White Rajah”). There's a book set
in India too (“Cawnpore”), although
that's the only one of his settings that Tom hasn't visited. “Never mind”, he
says,” there's always next year”

So over to Tom
himself:

Waterloo 200 years on – and its lessons for today

This month marks the
200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Do the events of 1815 have any
lessons for us today? Quite possibly, they do.

Although, with the
benefit of hindsight, we all know that Napoleon was finally defeated at
Waterloo, the generals and politicians of the time had celebrated his fall with
the capture of Paris in 1814. The Corsican Corporal's exile to Elba marked the
end of the Napoleonic Wars as clearly as the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the
end of the Cold War.

Off to Elba, 1814 - classic contemporary cartoon by Gillray

As with the end of the Cold War, the British were quick to cash in the peace
dividend. The country had been at war more or less continuously for 21 years
since France declared what would become known as the War of the First Coalition
on 1 February 1793. At the height of the Napoleonic wars the British had over
200,000 British men under arms (supplemented with a further 50,000 foreign and
colonial troops). The cost of the war had been horrific. The direct economic
cost to Great Britain is usually put at £831 million (a figure quoted by no
less a body than the Royal Statistical Society in 1915). In 21st-century value
terms the sum would, of course, be massively greater. The cost led to an
increase in the national debt to £679 million, more than double the country's
GDP. Such an enormous amount of money meant significant disruption to the
economy of the whole country. The number of young men taken away from the land
in order to fight impacted on agricultural production and the significantly
increased taxation also hit the economy. In 1814, the British Treasury issued
perpetual bonds (now known as consols) to consolidate some of the outstanding
debt. Some of these bonds have still not been paid off and form part of 2015's
National Debt.

Little wonder that,
as soon as Napoleon was apparently safely ensconced on Elba, the government
took immediate steps to reduce military expenditure. Most obviously, troops
were demobilised. Other economies included such things as abandoning the line
of semaphore towers that connected London to the Channel ports.

The folly of these
economies was obvious as soon as Napoleon returned to France and the semaphore
towers were rushed back into service. More critically, Wellington desperately
needed troops, but there were few troops to be had. Many of those that were
available were new recruits with no experience of battle. More experienced men
had either been discharged or sent to America to reinforce troops fighting a
completely separate war over there (the war in which the British famously burned
down the White House).

Closing the gates at Hougoumont by Robert Gibb(with acknowledgement to the National Gallery of Scotland)

Just as nowadays we
are assured that in times of war the Regular Army can be efficiently and
effectively supplemented with troops from the Territorial Army, so, in 1815,
there was a militia that could be called up to serve "in time of war or
insurrection". But though Bonaparte was back in Paris, was Britain at war?
Legally, it was not, and so the government dithered, refusing to call up the
militia until the last moment. When militia troops did arrive, it was so late
that many of them went into battle wearing their militia uniforms rather than
those of the regiments with which they were now serving. Although paintings
made after the event all show Hougoumont defended by Guardsmen in their
scarlet, many of the defenders had not yet been issued with Guards tunics.

Wellington asked that
he should have 40,000 British infantry and 15,000 cavalry to be sent to
Belgium. All he got was around 30,000 British soldiers of all arms, only 7,000
of them veterans.

Wellington was
particularly angry that his Staff officers had been dispersed and he was unable
to rely on the coterie of veterans who had surrounded him during the Peninsular
War. Wellington was a great believer in what would nowadays be called cronyism.
He ran the army with a group of men he had grown up with and felt comfortable
alongside. Now they were scattered – dead, serving in North America, or
otherwise unavailable for active service. Instead, Wellington found himself
surrounded with increasing numbers of well-connected young men who sought
service on his Staff as a good career move. He wrote, "I am overloaded
with people I have never seen before; and it appears to be purposely intended
to keep those out of my way whom I wish to have." He ordered back to his
side any of the men that he thought that he could trust, even those he had some
personal antipathy to. Men who thought they had seen the last of military life
found themselves once again under the Colours. The irascible Picton was
recalled so unexpectedly that he famously arrived with no uniform at all and
rode into battle (and to his death) in civilian clothes.

Unsurprisingly,
Wellington was unimpressed with the force available to him: "I have got an
infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced staff."

The meeting of Wellington and the Prussian Commander, Bluecher by Daniel Maclise(National
Army Museum and Parliamentary copyright with all rights reserved)

In the end, of
course, Wellington won. But it was hardly the great British victory it is
painted as. Forty per cent of the troops in the army Wellington commanded were
German-speaking and, of course, it was the arrival of Blucher's Prussians that
finally saved the day. Earlier in the afternoon there had been panic in
Brussels, as the civilian population was convinced that the Allies had lost. It
was, indeed, as Wellington is regularly misquoted as saying, "A damn close
run thing". A British army, ill-prepared and outgunned, pulled through
because, in the end, but fighting men stood their ground, dying by the
thousand, sacrificed to what we would now call defence cuts and Whitehall
bungling.

The lesson of
Waterloo is that you never know where and when you might have to fight. The
militia was mobilised too late and, though they appear to have fought bravely,
Wellington was always concerned that their lack of experience could all too
easily have resulted in them breaking under fire. Two hundred years later we do
not have the stomach to see British soldiers die in those numbers but we do not
appear to be taking the steps that are needed to ensure that we do not put an “infamous
army” into the field again.

Napoleon is in exile
on Elba, but Bonapartists in Paris are plotting for his return. James Burke,
British spy, is sent to infiltrate their ranks. He foils attempts to
assassinate the Duke of Wellington and the French king, but the Bonapartist
mastermind escapes. Burke pursues him from the cafes of Paris to the ballrooms
of Brussels, a chase that ends in a final showdown on the field of Waterloo.
Burke at Waterloo is a spy thriller set against a carefully researched
historical background with Wellington's famous victory seen from an unusual
perspective.

2 comments:

Good article, particularly drawing attention to cashing in on phony peace dividends after a long war. I remember how scary the world was after Vietnam when ill-advised US leadership decided to cash in peace dividends of those days, and temporarily may have found themselves weaker than the Soviet Union. I remember reading about Syria having the latest fighter planes while we still old stuff. I threw that in the face of a peacenik Democrat running for office who visited as a guest speaker the Lutheran teachers college where I was a student Fortunately President Carter realized half-way through his one term in office what a big mistake had been made. Then Reagan took office and with the support of your wonderful Maggie Thatcher, reinforced by General Sir John Hackett's insightful World War II cautionary novels, we (the free world) dodged the bullet, atomic or otherwise. Thank you Antoine for introducing us to another significant UK author to read.

Many thanks for this Carl and glad you mentioned Hackett's two WW3 books - the most detailed account, by a distinguished professional soldier of what WW3 could have been like. And I'll pass on your well-deserved compliments to Tom Williams, whom I'll be seeing later today at a small celebration he's holding for the Waterloo 200th anniversary.

About Me

My "Dawlish Chronicles" are set in the late 19th Century and reflect my deep interest in the politics, attitudes and technology of the period. The fifth novel in the series, “Britannia’s Amazon” is now available in both paperback and Kindle formats. It follows the four earlier Dawlish Chronicles, "Britannia's Wolf", "Britannia's Reach”, "Britannia's Shark" and "Britannia's Spartan". Click on the book covers below to learn more or to purchase.
I’ve had an adventurous career in the international energy industry and am proud of having worked in every continent except Antarctica. History is a driving passion in my life and I have travelled widely to visit sites of historical significance, many insights gained in this way being reflected in my writing. I welcome contact on Facebook and via this Blog. My website is www.dawlishchronicles.com and its “Conflict” section has a large number of articles on topics from the mid-18th Century to the early 20th Century.